Would you be willing to talk face to face to a person who is linked to some of your life’s greatest pain? Loretta Ross had to ask herself this exact question in 1979.
A survivor of childhood sexual assault, she was a 26-year-old single mother channeling her pain into purpose as the executive director of the DC Rape Crisis Center. Ross, who was helping other rape survivors all while trying to heal from her own trauma, received a letter from a man in prison asking for help on how not to be a rapist anymore.
“I decided to go to the prison to curse out the man, though the story I told myself in my 20s was that I was going there with the goal to rehabilitate him,” says Loretta J. Ross, human rights activist, associate professor at Smith College and author of the new book Calling In: How To Start Making Change With Those You’d Rather Cancel. “But now in my 70s and looking at it 50 years later, the truth is that I was going to the prison to curse him out because I had never been allowed to hold my abusers accountable.”
What Ross discovered by visiting that prison was quite unexpected. She was met with a group of men who called themselves Prisoners Against Rape. They asked her to help them learn about things like feminism, Black history, and violence against women. Slowly over time, Ross and the men shared their stories, and many in the group were also survivors. She writes in Calling In, “Prisoners Against Rape was their way of lifting their voices as victimized violators, to bring attention to their pain as well as their crimes.”
She says she walked away from those meetings with the men’s group really considering whether they had offered lifelines to each other, setting a foundation for Ross to begin to heal her own hate and shame at the same time it opened a door for the men to stop using violence as their language.
“What I learned was that my desire to hurt, born out of my fear, didn’t work for me. It wasn’t who I really was. So even the desire to hurt was me playing out a script rather than being the authentic me,” says Ross. “And I wonder how many other people hurt people because they feel that’s what they must do because of their fears. So I wrote the book to show people that you have choices, and to try to make the choices that reflect who you really are rather than living out the role society assigns you to play.”
Learning To Call In Instead of Call Out
Ross’ experience speaking to the men at the prison was the beginning of a lifelong practice of calling in, an accountability measure that is a strategic choice to communicate with love and respect rather than anger, shaming and blaming. She believes many of us carry unhealed trauma, which is a consequence of life, and that it’s not effective to help someone achieve accountability for the harms they’ve caused others if we in turn harm them in the process.
“I don’t think anybody, regardless of their class or race or gender, is free of being traumatized. As a matter of fact, I think some of the most powerful people in the world demonstrate their trauma every day by the way they treat other people, and have contempt for them,” says Ross. “Given that, we always get to make choices about whether we’re going to be trauma informed or trauma driven. Wisdom is learning to recognize your trauma without letting it take the wheel of your life. Many of us have to confront that choice at some point if we have any degree of self awareness. Or you can just continue to be trauma driven and then justify the harm you cause to others because you’ve got all this unaddressed pain within yourself.”
Calling In As An Everyday Practice
Ross has since expanded upon the calling-in lessons she learned at that prison during her five decades as an activist in the human rights movement, doing everything from helping to deprogram white supremacists to working inside the women’s movement to bridge understanding between people of different backgrounds and races.
However, the practice of calling in isn’t to be used only in extraordinary circumstances. It can be practiced in the everyday moments of our lives. We can try calling in the uncle whose political views are different from our own and invite him into a conversation by leading with curiosity. We can call in the neighbor who said something that hurt us by assuming the best of them and asking if that is what they truly intended. We can call in the colleague who may be unintentionally excluding team members.
“My book is not about the worst-case scenarios. My book is about everyday interactions,” says Ross. “While I use my personal examples of being a rape survivor teaching rapists not rape anymore, or being a Black woman who was shot at in Mississippi trying to rehabilitate a white supremacist, those things are not going to happen in everyday people’s lives. So I really wanted the audience of my book to be the everyday person who decides that just because you don’t politically align with someone you care about doesn’t mean that you can’t have conversations with them, or that you can’t build bonds of trust and affection with them. You can learn how not to flatten them out to labels that are convenient for you to use, but that don’t fully describe their humanity.”
Strategies For Calling In
To be clear, calling in is not about glossing over prejudice, injustice, and other types of harm but about accountability done with grace. It’s not a quick fix, it’s not easy, and it might not be for you if your heart and mind aren’t in the right place. Ross writes in her book that no one is obligated to call another person in. We can’t always respond with patience or understanding. It’s not about assuming you can ‘fix’ other people.
Calling in is about holding those who caused harm accountable, all while holding the ability to forgive in your heart. Calling in can allow the harm-doer room to grow in a way they wouldn’t otherwise if you lobbed harm back at them, while at the same time opening a window of potential for your own healing. Ross’ practice of calling in requires courage, curiosity, and compassion. It’s about showing love and respect to those you disagree with because you recognize each other’s humanity. Also, forgiveness can be a gift you give to yourself.
“For me, the starting point is always self-forgiveness,” says Ross. “If you can’t forgive yourself for your mistakes, then chances are you’re not going to be able to find the capacity to forgive others.”
In her book, Ross breaks down in detail a concrete strategy for effectively calling in, keeping in mind that the circumstances and people surrounding every call-in are different.
One example Ross shares in the book is of a blind woman who participated in one of her calling-in classes. The woman was uncomfortable with strangers touching her, but said every time she took a step up or walked through a door in a public space, an arm would come out of nowhere and place itself on her body to help her. It made her angry and lash out, and she felt conflicted because she didn’t want to constantly call them out and discourage strangers from helping other people, but the woman also didn’t want to go through life being touched without her permission.
Ross suggested she reinterpret it first by thanking the stranger for their kindness, because that is a quality we want to see more of in the world. The second step is to say in a calm voice something like, ‘I appreciate you helping me, but I really don’t like people putting their hands on me unexpectedly.’ “This way you’re calling on them to reconcile their good intention with their poorly executed behavior,” says Ross. The next step is to guide them to what would work instead, such as perhaps asking first.
Modeling The World We Want to See
In the pages of Calling In, Ross points out that we have all made mistakes, big and small. We have all been the recipients of harm, and have inflicted harm. While we can’t choose what happens to us in life, we can choose how we react. We can choose to perpetuate cruelty or kindness. We can choose to begin healing ourselves. We can choose to model the world we want to see. Ross wants us to know that we always have a choice, and we can choose love.
Ross says this is already in us, as can be seen by how people respond to others in need in the face of a natural disaster. “We don’t care about their politics, whether they’re gay, whether they’re an immigrant. We don’t care about any of that stuff,” says Ross. “We just see another human being in need. And to the best of our abilities, we’re going to respond to that need, because that speaks to our own humanity and our recognition of the humanity of the other. I want us to also have that same effortless compassion to man-made disasters, such as racism and poverty. Let’s figure out a way to build on what is already in us, as opposed to assuming that it’s not in somebody simply because they have a different perspective than you.”